If we give immunity from criticism to children — such as David Hogg, et al. — then adults will rely on children to do what adults want done.

I don't know how much the post-Parkland protesters are acting directly from their own hearts — it's politically expedient to see them as saints! — but if they are protected from criticism, it creates a dangerous incentive to adults who want immunity from criticism.

There are so many children around, and it is the way of the world for millennia to seize upon these handy little creatures — they're everywhere! — and use them to do the work adults want done. I'm not saying that's what's already happened with the post-Parkland protesters, just that the kid-gloves treatment of these vocal participants in the public dialogue sends a message to conniving adults that there's a special benefit to using children.

There are consequences.

I'm thinking of the use of minors in criminal activities, which is facilitated by the benevolence of the juvenile court system. The use of children in drug commerce produced a backlash:

During the early 1990s, under a set of faulty assumptions about a coming generation of “super-predators,”* 40 states passed legislation to send even more juveniles into the adult courts for a growing array of offenses and with fewer procedural protections....

This tough-on-crime era left in its wake state laws that still permit or even require drug charges to be contested in adult courts. Scant data exist to track its frequency, but fully 46 states and the District of Columbia permit juveniles to be tried as adults on drug charges. Only Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, and New Mexico do not....

By the way, I was robbed once in my life. It was in Italy, by children who were, obviously, used by adults to ply the old pickpocketing trade. People near me caught the children, and the police came. There was much chatter in the police office, and then the children were let go. I received an explanation in English: "They're children!" But everyone knew that children were used (abused) precisely because the police would let them go.

Meanwhile: "Noor Salman, the widow of the man who gunned down dozens of people at the Pulse nightclub two years ago, was found not guilty by a federal jury on Friday of helping her husband carry out a terrorist attack in the name of the Islamic State" (NYT). Message: Use your women, because their role will not be taken seriously.

So what can we say — as we debate public issues — about the children (and the women)? How much, if at all, can they be criticized? And what is their fate if we treat them as innocents, tiny oracles of emotional meaning? Meaning well and thinking of yourself as a fount of empathy is not enough to keep them on a straight path of goodness and not enough to protect other decent enough people from harm.
_____________

* Here's Hillary Clinton trying to detach herself from her own "super-predators" statement, from 1994, which had become politically inconvenient in 2016: